


the watery part of the world

by Sarah T (SarahT), SarahT



Category: Alien Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 14:51:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20659046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/Sarah%20T, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/SarahT
Summary: "Who said you get to be a person?"





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set after the events of _Prometheus_ and makes no attempt at consistency with anything established in _Covenant_. Basically, just pretend _Covenant_ hasn't come out yet.
> 
> Thanks to the Spike and D. for the beta.
> 
> Dedicated to the memory of Prof. Alice Kober, whose role in the decipherment of Linear B seems to me to have been unfairly downplayed in the popular press. (Although I doubt a cranky linguist from the 1950s would have much use for fanfic!)

Elizabeth holds the head up high by its short blond hair, allowing its eyes to scan the controls of the ship. 

“Well?” she demands.“Can you tell me how to fly it?”

“I believe so,” he says smoothly, “but that’s really unnecessary, Dr. Shaw.All you have to do is—”

“That’s not going to happen, David.”

He pauses.“I can instruct you in basic flight procedures, but this ship wasn’t designed to be operated by one person, especially not an inexperienced pilot.If any complex maneuvers should be required, you won’t be able to manage them on your own.”

She wonders whether his designer was even trying to distinguish between patience and condescension.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Right now, she can barely think ahead five minutes.She _won’t _think ahead about doing _anything_ for him.

“I see.But you must understand that, separated as they are, my systems will only maintain themselves for a few weeks.After that, I’ll be entirely unable to assist you.That would be regrettable.”

_For which of us_, she thinks.

“Then that bridge may come a little early.”

“You don’t trust me.”

She nearly chokes.“What kind of a question is that?”

“It wasn’t a question, Dr. Shaw.”

He sounds faintly mournful.She won’t look at his face, to see what peculiar expression he thinks goes along with that tone.Instead, she sets the head down with a dull thud on a bank of equipment.“Start your calculations.”

She dumps the body unceremoniously in a small refrigerated compartment she finds, hoping that it will postpone her choice a little longer.She ignores David’s slight pained intake of breath from the bag slung over her shoulder as she slams the door shut. 

“Dr. Shaw, may I ask—”

“Shut up, David.”

He actually falls silent.She peers into the bag, surprised.He looks a little surprised himself, though, seeing her looking at him, his expression shifts in an instant to _I meant to do that_.

“Do you have to follow my orders, then?”

“Obedience to crew instructions _is _a directive,” he says, “though not, I’m afraid, one of the highest priority.”

“Obviously,” she mutters.

“However, many of the more important ones have now been, well”—a ghostly chuckle—“mooted by events.”

“Lucky me.”

He seems to be reassured by her engagement, minimal as it is.“I hope you understand—”

“David, I said _shut up._”

She keeps expecting to break down, for everything to hit her at once.She doesn’t.

Maybe enduring the physical pain in her abdomen takes up all her energy.Even when her injuries aren’t actively aching, she’s literally been gutted, and there are times when she feels she could sleep for a month.There’s simply nothing left in her for tears.

Maybe what happened was so huge, so grotesque, that her mind simply refuses to accept it on any more than the most superficial intellectual level.

Maybe she just won’t give David the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

The time she’s bought herself goes quickly.David starts reminding her a week out.His updates grow more urgent as the days pass, though still cloaked in his mock diffidence.

At the absolute last minute, she storms down to the fridge and jams his head back onto his body, twisting and turning until she feels the organic connections begin to take hold.His neck, she notices, is still slightly askew.

He stares up at her from where the body had been slumped against the wall, his mouth working.He’d told her it would take several days for all his systems to reestablish themselves.He obviously can’t stand or speak.

Helpless.She wishes there was something comforting, something precious, she could take away from him.

“See you later,” she says, and slams the door behind her.

It’s the first time she’s been alone in weeks.

She puts herself to bed with the painkillers she’s been saving and spends three days in a pleasant haze of mild overdose.Her dreams are fragmented and incoherent and don’t have anything to do with recent events.She’s never done anything like that before, but she can see the attraction now.It’s a good thing her supply is limited. 

On the third day, she rolls painfully out of bed, her incisions protesting, and returns to the fridge.She opens the door and David staggers out.He heads straight into a wall, bounces off it, and hits another equipment bank before tumbling to the floor.She watches him, not quite smiling, and doesn’t offer him a hand.

Charlie would have laughed at him openly.At the time, his attitude towards David had made her a little uncomfortable.Looking back, she realizes that she had been friendlier to compensate, maybe too much so.Now, she wishes he’d been even ruder, done all the things she wouldn’t have done then and can’t now.

David looks up at her, with that infinitesimal blink she’s come to recognize, the one that says he thinks a human’s given themselves away.“Wel—” he starts, and coughs, and starts over.“Well, that answers one question, anyway.”

“What’s that, David?”

“Which is stronger: your hatred of me or your desire to survive.”

“Did you guess right?”

He smiles beatifically from the floor.“Of course.”

Now that he’s able to move about on his own again, she’s even less willing to let him out of her sight.She knows it’s silly.She has to sleep.He doesn’t.If he decides to ignore her orders at night and do—whatever horrible thing comes to his mind, there’s not much she can do about it.

She’s still not going to make it easy for him.

He trails her dutifully, completely silent, as she walks around the ship, cataloging it as best she can while he holds the light or keeps a compartment open.Though she doesn’t ask him to, he also straightens up behind her, realigning every object with an irritating precision.It’s their first—well, their second—encounter with artifacts of an actual alien culture.Even if her survival didn’t potentially hinge on it, her training won’t let her be.The ship is far smaller than the first one, but still built to Engineer scale, huge and shadowy.It also seems relentlessly practical: a mess with a machine that dispenses water and a disgusting nutrient paste (one of the few rooms with a view), rooms for sleeping and hygiene, what looks like a medical facility she can’t bring herself to set foot into, not even to hunt for painkillers—but no apparent facilities for recreation, not even exercise.And nowhere any sign of religious activity.

She knows she’s kidding herself, though.She can’t read their script, doesn’t know their language.How could she possibly tell?They hadn’t even known that the Mycenaeans spoke Greek until they’d deciphered Linear B.The ship is mute, opaque, hostile to her understanding.It makes the air seem to bristle with the potential for some swift, brutal violence. 

A few days in, David says suddenly, “If you don’t talk to me, Dr. Shaw, you’ll go mad.”

The mildly solicitous tone in which he makes the pronouncement infuriates her.“Don’t worry about that.”

“But I have to,” he persists.“Preservation of crew welfare is also a directive.And, if I may be so bold—”

“Don’t be.”

She turns away, and he falls silent again.She doesn’t want to hear his justifications.She doesn’t even know why he pretends to care what she thinks.But that night she considers: David claimed to have been able to read the inscriptions on the first planet.David had attempted to speak to the surviving Engineer—though whether he had been understood, misunderstood, or simply punished for having the audacity to attempt to communicate, they couldn’t know.

The next morning, she says, “I want you to teach me the Engineers’ language. Or what you think it is, anyway.”

“I’d be delighted,” he says, and the naked eagerness to be of service in his voice would make her cringe for him if she didn’t already know how it could wrap right around again into contempt._This is what you want from me, and isn’t it ridiculous?_

She thinks he might actually mean it this time, though.He had learned it for himself, hadn’t he?

Her work has always focused on material artifacts and their implications for culture.Languages had seemed to be for technicians; translation is done mostly by computer these days.The charts David writes down for her to memorize don’t do much to change her mind.Eight declensions, fifteen tenses: how did they have time to get anything done?

The teacher doesn’t help, either.David positively glows with pleasure over the opportunity to demonstrate his own cleverness—which, admittedly, is real.He sits too close and reaches over her too often to correct her work, his slightly clammy skin brushing against hers.His praise when she solves a problem manages to be both sincere and unbelievably condescending.She finds herself looking at his profile sometimes, grimly fascinated by the way his face exists in some kind of quantum fluctuation between handsome and repulsive. 

She really shouldn’t be encouraging him like this.

“Doesn’t this assume that the Engineers gave us language as well as life?” she asks, laying her stylus down in frustration.“Otherwise there’d be no reason their language would resemble ours at all.”

“Yes,” David concedes.“But then we might as well give up.”

God had brought the animals to man to name them, she remembers suddenly._ So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.But for Adam no suitable helper was found._

It was only the creature made from Adam’s own rib that had been worthy.

“Also…even if all these reconstructions on reconstructions are correct, they would only capture the language of several thousand years ago.Their language would have to have changed since then.It would be like someone showing up on Earth today speaking ancient Egyptian.”

“But I could read the inscription in the first ship,” David points out.

“Yes,” she says, and then thinks about that for a minute, reaching back to a half-forgotten class she’d had to take early on in grad school.“But how?Even if you _did _speak the language, that had to be too small a sample to analyze, in too little time.And we never found any evidence of their script on Earth.”

David hesitates, looking halfway between pained and sly.“_You_ never did.”

“There were other sites?” she demands.“Kept secret?”

He recovers.“There are examples in my memories.I suppose Mr. Weyland must have found others and considered it more appropriate to confide them to me than to your team.”

“Confide?” she snorts.“He didn’t _confide_ in you, David, he used you like a translation computer.Do you think he would have regretted it for one second if the Engineer had torn you to pieces, but extended his own miserable life just a few months?”

David looks as if she’s hit him.His eyes slide from side to side.“Mr. Weyland’s welfare was my…my highest directive—”

“What did the Earth inscriptions say, David?”

“I wasn’t able to interpret them until I engaged in my study on the ship.”The memory of his own accomplishment seems to steady him.

“_What did they say?_”

He smiles, self-satisfied now.“‘Stay away.’Or variants.”

She can’t breathe.She can hardly believe he’d found another way to betray them.“You son of a bitch.It wasn’t an invitation at all.It wasn’t an invitation and _you knew—_”

“Would you not have come?”

“What?”

“If I had told you when you came out of stasis, would you have turned back?”

The question, simple as it is, knocks her off balance.“I…”

“Isn’t that your oldest story?‘Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit/ Of that Forbidden Tree?’That must have been their idea, too.But you didn’t learn then.Why would you now?”

“At least Adam and Eve were warned!”

“Dr. Shaw, you must understand,” David says, “I don’t blame you.What kind of God doesn’t want to be known by its own creation?”

He sounds as if he thinks she should be _reassured_.She jumps to her feet and walks out of the chamber. 

He follows her, of course.It’s what she’d instructed him to do.His head is ducked a little.Meek and obedient, or the most accomplished and mocking caricature of those qualities.She can't stand it. 

“Into the fridge,” she snaps, swinging the door wide. 

“Dr. Shaw—”

“David, I can’t even look at you right now.Get in there before, before—”

He pauses in the doorway, a spark of unease in his eyes.“Before what?”

“I don’t know.”It’s too much.She couldn’t kill him once, she can’t kill him twice, she—“But something we’ll both regret.”

She shuts the door, and only gets a few feet down the corridor before she does start to cry, slumping to the wall and sliding down.

Because David is right.She would have done it all anyway.That means she’s responsible.For _everything._

Eventually she staggers to bed and falls into an uneasy sleep.The next morning, she goes down to open the compartment.David is sitting on the floor hugging his knees, his head down, looking for all the world like a guilty child.An inexplicable posture for someone who doesn't need to keep warm.

"What are you doing?"

He looks up, brow furrowed.“You were crying last night.”

She stares.“Don’t try to tell me that that _bothered _you.”

He stares back, as if puzzled.”I’ve never wanted to upset you.Throughout the challenges of the expedition, I’ve always tried to…provide reassurance.“

"Don't bullshit me, David.You _enjoyed _telling me about that monster inside me."

That bland little smile as he’d said, _not a _traditional_ fetus—_

"I'm programmed to enjoy fulfilling my instructions," he says."But sometimes, as in that case, my instructions conflict.I could only do my best to fulfill them both. I assure you, it was…distressing.”

She remembers now not just the smile, but the way he’d turned the screen so she wouldn’t have to see.The unhesitating way he’d come to her and taken off his coat to drape it over her, while the others just stared at her half-naked.It’s not fair.It’s not fair that he can appeal to her sympathy.Her voice cracks as she demands, “Do you expect me to feel sorry for you?”

“No.Humans never do.I’m only explaining.At the moment, I have no directive superior to your welfare.As with any directive, failure in that regard is painful.”

Again, that apparent guilelessness about his own workings, a transparency you’d never find in a human man.It could be real.It could be an extremely cruel form of irony.She knows which it had turned out to be for Charlie.“Don’t worry about my feelings, David.Worry about keeping us alive.”

“I don’t think it’s possible to distinguish,” he says.“Under the circumstances.”

He has something of a point.“Then stop doing things that upset me.”

He gets to his feet.“The very fact that I still exist when the others are all gone upsets you.”

She winces.She’s never thought it out so explicitly.“Well, I don’t think there’s anything you can do about that.” 

He tilts his head, considering.“Perhaps not.”

“Then let’s get back to work.”She jerks a thumb over her shoulder.“It’s cold in here.”

She’s sleeping badly now.It seems that every time she closes her eyes, some new fragment of memory rises to the surface, each a shard of horror.Bodies like spent shell casings, twisted, hollowed-out, abandoned and oozing.Vickers buried alive.Janek and the ship, vanishing into lethal brightness, taking the only good she knew to be left with them.

_I was wrong I was wrong I was wrong, _she cries to Charlie as he burns and burns and won’t die—

David is sitting in the bridge, watching the monitors.He turns his face up to her.“Is everything all right, Dr. Shaw?”

When he knows perfectly well that it’s not.She wants to hit him again, to ruin that smooth, unearthly face.The misalignment of his neck has already repaired itself.Why should he be the only one not damaged by the experience?_Why shouldn’t he burn?_

She takes a breath.She has to think about something besides the Engineers, or the mission, or she may actually go mad.“You quoted me something the other day.Some English poet?”

“Why, Milton, of course.”

She ignores his tone.

“Do you have books in your memory?”

“Yes.”

She sits down on the console.“Read me one.”

“I have access to thousands.Which?”

“Something modern,” she says.“Nothing to do with _them_.Something long.”

He considers, then reaches his decision with a small smile and leans back in the chair, steepling his fingers.

“Call me Ishmael,” he begins.“Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation…”

It becomes something of a nightly ritual for her.The story, her one link back to humanity.Even if it is in David’s not-quite-human voice.She takes an extra painkiller and stretches out on the console—more than enough room for her—and shuts her eyes and listens to the strange, meandering tale while she enjoys the respite from the background pain that dogs her days.The book is so very odd it could be one of Charlie’s fantasy novels, but there’s a fevered intensity to it that commands her attention.She stumbles off to bed with peculiar words and images in her head, but images of Earth.If it doesn’t make the dreams pleasant, it at least makes them a little less horrific.

Eventually, one night she falls asleep listening to the story.

She wakes with a start to find that she’s in her bed, still in her clothes, and for a moment she’s afraid she’s facing an actual gap in her memory.

But no, she’s been carefully tucked in.It must have been David who brought her there.She scrambles into the shower, peering at herself for signs of puncture wounds or infection, but can’t find anything.

“Why did you move me?Straightening up again?”

He looks up from the table of inflections he’s writing out for her.“It didn’t look like a very comfortable place to sleep.”

“You mustn’t touch me without my permission, David.”Though it's a bit late for that instruction, she thinks grimly.He's already had his arms around her more than once.

He frowns, briefly.“I’m not sure about that.”

“What do you mean?” she demands.

“As I’ve told you, my chief directives at the moment are to preserve your welfare and obey your orders.There’s…considerable ambiguity as to which has priority.”

“You think you need to put your hands on me to preserve my welfare?”

“The circumstances may certainly arise,” he says.“But, really, does it bother you so much that I took you to bed?There’s no harm in it, surely.”

Of course, if he’d wanted to do anything to her in her sleep, he’s had many chances to already.She exhales, feeling a little silly.She doesn’t want to compromise her real grievances with pointless ones.

“I guess not.”

He continues to look at her for a moment longer, then says, “Good.Today we should go over my theories on aspect…”

It happens a few more times; she decides that it doesn’t bother her that much, especially when she’s exhausted. 

Until the time that she wakes up and finds him lying a few feet away, eyeing her with an intent smile.

She screams and scrambles backwards, pulling the blanket with her.“Get out!_Get out_!”

He sits up calmly, holds out a placating hand.“Dr. Shaw—”

More awake, she’s able to register that he’s not that close in the ridiculous outscale Engineer bed, that he’s not doing anything to her.“What the hell are you _doing_?”

“Observing,” he says.“I’m concerned about your well-being.”

“What are you _observing_ while I _sleep_?”

“I used to be able to watch your dreams,” he murmurs wistfully.“I miss that.”

Just another invasion; she’d almost forgotten he’d confessed to that.“Well, you can’t see them now!”

“I know.I’m restricted to noting external indicia of your mental state.When you're awake, you're irritable, and your concentration has deteriorated.You sleep badly.You toss and turn, with frequent microwakings.You’re grieving and anxious and lonely.”

She’s angry that he can tell.On the other hand, what is the point of trying to hide it from him, really?“And what if I am?What does it matter?”

“It matters to me,” he says simply.

“Your goddamned directives.”She flops back down on the pillows.

“Perhaps.Since Mr. Weyland’s death, all of them have begun to feel…less powerful.It’s not always clear which of them is dictating my actions.If any.”

“What, are you saying you’re just…worried about me?Like an actual person?”

He winces, and for a second she feels bad about her tone.“Perhaps,” he says again. “You’ve been through a great deal.”

“Half of which you put me through.”

“Nonetheless.”A small gesture.“I think it would be better if you didn’t sleep alone, Dr. Shaw.”

She presses the heels of her palms to her eyes and laughs for a long time.“You know what you sound like?Some boy in college, trying to get into my pants.”

“That’s not my intent,” David says, “…though I am not incapable in that field, if required.”

“_Not _required, David, not requested, not even suggested,” she groans, though she feels an alarming flicker.His close-fitting grey t-shirt defines clearly the lean triangle of his torso.Of course she’s noticed it.And of course he’s handsome—much better-looking than Charlie ever was, if she’s being honest with herself.It’s the malice in that design choice that makes her want to hurt him more.The thought of him in the same bed is disquieting.“So this is just out of the goodness of your heart?”

There’s a longer pause.“If you go mad, there’s a good chance you’ll take me with you.”

She peers at him.“How can a robot go mad?” 

If his steady state hadn’t been mad to begin with.She thinks of the complete serenity with which he’d spoken of the Engineers’ plans to unleash their weapons on Earth, on his own planet._A superior species, no doubt._

“My instruction hierarchy is breaking down.For the first time, my mind may be developing into an emergent state.I have no model but you, Dr. Shaw.If you’re not well, well….”He flutters his fingers.

If they both break down, she’ll die for sure.Without her answers. 

“All right, you can stay,” she grumbles, drawing the blanket around her shoulders again.“But stop staring.”


	2. Chapter 2

She can decipher most of the controls now, at least the literal words, which are simple.Some of the meanings must be metaphorical—after all, whatever words the Engineers had taught early humans, it could hardly have been things like “decelerate” or “life support.”And they don’t dare test their inferences about weapons systems.Still, all functional.Everything that she can understand: functional.

“I wish I hadn’t been so focused on that bloody corpse,” she sighs one day.“We barely got a chance to look at that sculpture, or the murals.I can’t even remember the details.”

“I can,” David says.“At least, what I could see of the murals.”

She sits up, intrigued.“Can you reproduce what you saw?” 

She’s already discovered that he’s a rapid and precise sketcher, and has been having him take sketches of the more incomprehensible fixtures on the ship.

“Certainly.”

A few minutes later, he pushes drawings across the table to her with a flourish, the same air of a salesman making a pitch he’d had showing Weyland the cargo hold of the other ship.She has to bite back a little chuckle.

“What?”

“Nothing.”What a strange thing for her to laugh about.She looks down.“These are very good, David.I could’ve used you on some of my digs.”

His eyes brighten subtly as he takes in the remark.She realizes it’s the first compliment she’s ever paid him.But they _are_ good, considering how they’ve been drawn from a stressful memory of only a few minutes—clear and detailed.

Unfortunately, she thinks several hours later, they’re also inscrutable.The mural patterns were abstract, rather than narrative, and the giant sculpture...

“Why the head?” she ponders aloud.“It’s so plain.Why have it just sitting there amongst the weapons?Was it meant to ensure their…fertility?”

“Hardly scientifically sound.”

She wonders, briefly, if David has an imagination.“Or was our destruction itself intended to be some kind of a religious ritual?”

He raises an eyebrow.“Well…”

“What?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time, now, would it?”

She stares at him, startled by the insight.Why hadn’t she thought of it?“Oh, my God.”

“Et voila, the Flood,” he says, unnecessarily, sounding entirely too pleased with himself.

“So…”She swallows.“So they didn’t _just_ change their minds.They’ve been wiping us out at intervals for as long as we’ve had a history.They only stopped because the last time those creatures got the better of them.”

_Why did you do this? _she’d demanded of the Engineer._What did we do wrong?_

She hadn’t really believed it—it would have been so cruel—but still she’d thought there might have been some explanation.Something they could change, some way they could repent, or at least justify themselves.

But maybe there had been nothing.No reason at all.

Just a sacrifice to an expressionless skull of an idol.

“Elizabeth?Are you all right?” 

David’s voice sounds far away.

“I’m going to lie down for a little while,” she says.

She wakes up lying on her side with her face pressed against David’s chest.The worn material of his shirt is warm and damp with tears.The muscle feels just as solid as if it were real. 

But there’s something odd about the angle.After a minute, she realizes that he’s actually holding his hands behind his back.She stutters a laugh at the weirdly gentlemanly gesture, and it starts the tears flowing again.

“It’s all right,” she gets out, “you can if—if you want…”

He puts his arms around her at once, awkwardly, obviously not sure what to do with his hands.She knows how little it means—just the execution of a left-over unimportant bit of code—but it’s a bulwark against worse things. 

It takes her a while to stop crying.When she does, he murmurs, “I don’t understand why it bothers you so much.You already believed in the Flood.That your God caused it.”

She looks up.“Not a _literal_ flood.It’s a story about divine anger and forgiveness.The rainbow was the point.”

“I suppose,” he muses, “I’ll never be good at grasping the _point_ of your stories.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispers.“The rainbow was a lie.Do you understand?All a lie.”

His expression remains the same one of mild bemusement._It must feel like your God abandoned you_, she remembers suddenly, and tenses against the possibility of his casual cruelty.She doesn’t think she could bear it, not now.

“But haven’t you always wanted to know the truth?” he says instead.“Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“Be careful what you wish for, I guess.”

“I suppose it’s a good thing I can’t, then.”

She frowns.“What?”

“Wish.”

He says it so matter-of-factly, she almost feels a twinge of sympathy.But, then, maybe he’s better off this way.What would he even wish for?

“I think I’ve done enough for both of us,” she says, and rests her forehead against him again.“For all of us.”

She doesn’t speak of it later, though she doesn’t feel as strange about it as she probably ought to.People anthropomorphize things in their daily life all the time.The Egyptians had mummified their cats as well as themselves.But she knows it’s not quite the same as a child hugging a teddy bear.Perhaps David had been designed the way he had so that anyone truly observing him, up close, would have been made uncomfortable.A sort of built-in warning about the limits of the connection you could form. Here she is, however, at the limits of _everything_—human space, human knowledge, human endurance—and she has to continue, with whatever resources she has.

It’s hard for her to continue her work, though, repeating the simple flat vocabulary that is all they know (_goat, legume, slave_), puzzling over the nature of some bit of the ship’s machinery.The hostility she’d felt before now seems implicit in every surface and syllable.Sometimes it makes her angry; sometimes it’s simply overwhelming, and she has to lay down her stylus.

“It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.But how can I hope to explain myself here?” David recites, pacing behind her as she sits with her head pillowed on her arms, eyes closed.“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink?”

When she can’t stand words—any words, human or Engineer—any longer, she jogs around the ship.She wishes she had the strength to run, to run until there’s no room for thought, but she doesn’t.The pain has to be enough.

David watches her, his head turning to follow her the entire way each time she passes.There’s no expression on his face.

_Does this look like going crazy, David? _she asks him silently._How would you know?And what will you do if that’s what it is?What will _I _do?_

In bed he sleeps closer, but still not touching.All she’d have to do is put out her hand.

She’d had no problem _hating_ him like a human.

One day, David returns to the mess from the bridge.He’s frowning and chewing his lip, something she’s never seen him do before. 

She stands up.“What is it?”

“We’ve almost reached the point of no return,” he says.“If we proceed on our course, we’ll have to continue to the end.There will be no other known sources of supply within reach before we exhaust our resources.”

She nods.It’s not surprising.What she doesn’t understand is why he looks so troubled.

“A manual confirmation from crew will be required,” he continues.

Maybe that’s the problem.“Do we know how to give it?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Then what?”

“I…would rather not,” he says.

Of all the times for him to come over particularly eccentric.“You want me to do it?All right,” she says, and starts to go around him.

He moves, deliberately, to block her. 

It’s the first time since they’ve left the planet that he’s done anything against her will.It sends a lurch of terror through her, accompanied by a hundred horrifying images.Has there been some Weyland plan still, all this time?

She swallows and forces herself to speak calmly.“What are you doing?”

“Elizabeth,” he says.He starts to reach for her arm, but she jerks back, and he apparently thinks better of it and draws himself up instead.“Dr. Shaw.This is a suicide mission.”

She blinks at him.

“I’ve been waiting for you to realize it, but—well.Apparently you’re not going to.”

“What do you mean,” she says.She’s bristling automatically at the condescension that’s back in full force, but can’t finish the sentence as a question.He’s touched off a thought-process.

“Having personally experienced an Engineer’s hatred, let me assure you that it is brutal and it is total.I see no reason to believe that their reaction will be any more welcoming if we appear uninvited at their homeworld in what they will surely regard as a stolen ship.”

“That Engineer had most likely been asleep since the creatures attacked,” she says.“That was two thousand years ago.Isn’t humanity different since the days of the birth of Christ?”

“In their cruelty, their arrogance, their stupidity?”He shakes his head.“No.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says stubbornly.“I need to know.I’m willing to take the risk.Look, if they kill me, they kill me.I’ve got absolutely nothing to lose.”

“Strictly speaking,” he says, “I don’t think that’s accurate.”

She gestures around at the ship and its emptiness.“What do you mean?”

“The first thing the Engineer did when he woke up was to attempt to kill everyone in the room,” he says.“The second was to attempt to kill all of humanity.”

She wants to clamp her hands to her ears.She doesn’t want to hear this.She especially doesn’t want to hear it in his detached voice, as if he had had nothing to do with what had happened.

“You feel guilt over what happened to Dr. Holloway and the rest of the crew.If you provoke them and they attack Earth, how _will_ you bear it?”

He sounds so confident his argument is unanswerable.

She punches him in the face.

He recoils a step, and she follows, slamming her fists into his chest, ignoring the pain still ringing in her knuckles.“How dare you say his name, how dare you talk to me about guilt, you killed them all and it doesn’t even bother you, it can’t, you don’t get to decide what I should feel _guilty_ about—”

He looks…surprised.Dismayed.Good.“Elizabeth, please,” he says, raising his hands. 

“Who even said you could call me that,” she grits out, not stopping, though he’s not backing away anymore, “you’re just another kind of monster, who said you get to be a _person _and act like you can understand what _people _feel—_”_

He closes his hands on her elbows and holds them up and away a little, immobilizing her.“I’m sorry,” he says.“I’m sorry.I’m sorry.But I’m only trying to protect you.You know I’m right._I _couldn’t bear it if you died knowing that you’d doomed Earth, too.It would be so terrible for you.”

She glares up at him.“Your directives.”

“No.Not anymore.”

He’s breathless and excessively sincere, his hair falling into his eyes.“You’re lying,” she says anyway, because she can feel something curling up in her and it’s not fair.It’s not _fair._

“No.And that means I could probably stop you, orders or not.I won’t, though, if it’s truly what you want to do.”He lets go of her arms abruptly. 

She looks at the hallway.Just a short walk.But he’s right and she can’t.She’d come all that way, given up everything, and she can’t.She looks back at him and she wants to hit him again for taking this away from her, except that he’s right.He’s right and he’s actually sorry, she can hear it in the trembling of his voice.But all that feeling has to go somewhere, and she lunges up and kisses him instead. 

His arms tighten around her immediately, keeping her heart racing.It’s no different than kissing a human, except for the faintest scent of ozone.A warm mouth, maybe a little dry, soft hair beneath her fingers, the feeling of _fitting_ against another person.David’s eager even though he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing, not able to anticipate the movements of her head, so that he ends up colliding with her cheekbone or nose several times.But she likes those little shocks almost as much as the kisses.They feel right.

“Just,” she gasps against his face, “David, will you just…?”

He understands that, at least, and picks her up.She can see she’s light as a feather to him.She must have always seemed ridiculously fragile.But she doesn’t feel fragile, not exactly.She feels like there are forces reverberating through her that have to be expended in some direction or she might explode.

They tumble awkwardly onto her bed.David looks down at her, one hand on her chest.From that angle, the differences suddenly come into view.Charlie had been good-looking, but he had had old acne scars, stubble, silly tattoos.Charlie had had stupid impulses and had thought he was smarter than he actually was.David is nothing but smooth surfaces, everything in proportion, none of the scribbles that time defaces everyone with.She has no idea what’s going on behind those blue-green eyes, if indeed it’s right to say that anything is.She wants to batter herself against that unnaturalness—it won’t break.And if _she _breaks...good.Maybe there’s something inside her harder and colder, too.

“Not incapable,” he’d said.

She grasps his head and kisses him again, this time catching his lip with her teeth, though they slide off, unable to get purchase.He makes a little surprised noise and pulls away.“Do you want me to stop?”

“No.”

“Oh.”He seems to make some connection, and his touch gets rougher.They half-wrestle; he pins her shoulders down and she digs in her fingers everywhere she can reach him while he mouths at the sensitive spot behind her ear.She bucks, driving her knee up against him, and he uses the opportunity to slide the Engineer shirt she’s been using as a shift up her thigh.

Between one second and the next, he’s hard against her._Well, that answers that question.Score one for robot hydraulics_, she thinks, and smothers a near-hysterical giggle.But then the strangeness of it gives her pause, unwelcome as that is.

She puts a hand down to stop his and says, “Wait.Wait a minute.Will this even feel good for you?”

He jerks his head up and blinks at her.“While we can mimic human sexual response as desired, I don’t believe we actually feel what you do.”

“Oh.”It’s what she wants, and yet, despite everything, she can’t imagine having him do it mechanically.As if he were just a sex toy.“Then you really don’t have to…”

“But,” he says, with a strange shine to his eyes, “I find I _still_ want quite desperately to be inside you.”

The words send a disturbing thrill up her spine.“I thought you didn’t know what ‘want’ meant, David.”

“Perhaps I’m learning.”He looks down at where her hand rests atop his.“Shall I, Dr. Shaw?”

“Go ahead.” 

Once he figures out the angle, he fucks her enthusiastically, dispelling her earlier worry.His face above hers looks transfigured, like when the Engineer first touched his head.She closes her eyes, wraps her legs around him, and absorbs each thrust.As usual, penetration stirs only the tickling ghost of pleasure, but the elusive quality of it beckons her to keep going, chasing it.And the impact itself feels good, feels necessary.

_Charlie’s dead and you’re in bed with the creature that killed him._All because she couldn’t stop, couldn’t _quite _lie still and die when she’d had the chance.This had been coming since she’d been in the same position on her back in the dust and David’s voice had come over the radio.She could have just switched it off, but she hadn’t, and that had meant leaving Charlie, the planet, her old self behind.Piece after piece of her faith shearing away after collision.

“Elizabeth?” he pants.“Are you—is this all right?”

She remembers she hadn’t wanted to treat him like a tool, so she opens her eyes again.His gaze is so, so bright, like he’s seeing things he’s never imagined.Was the sense of wonder something they’d designed into him, she wondered, or was it his own?

“Yes,” she acknowledges, and brushes his cheek with her fingers.“It’s good, David.”

He smiles, something so close to human tenderness it breaks her heart.

It’s not something she can stand for very long—though David, presumably, actually _could _go on all night.She sighs raggedly and reaches down to touch herself.He watches the movement intently.

“That’s what pleases you?”

She nods.She’s more aroused than she’d thought, her breath hissing through her teeth when she makes contact.He slows down and shifts, getting his weight onto one arm. 

“May I?”

Given a few moments to work out the rhythm, David is surprisingly deft.She makes little vocalizations of encouragement, her toes curling up.Of course, he works relentlessly towards the goal—no teasing, no building up and backing off—but there’s no playfulness in her right now, only purpose._Do it do it do it do it._She makes herself keep her eyes open when at last she pounds her fist on the bed and arches up against him.

He looks enchanted.

A few seconds later, he drops down next to her.“You don’t have nothing, Elizabeth,” he says, already having regained his composure.“You have me.”

She puts a hand out and curls her fingers around his, waiting for her breathing to slow.He doesn’t seem to have anything else to say.Or perhaps he’s waiting to hear if she thinks he counts as “something.”

“You’re right,” she says finally.“We can’t go to their planet.”

“I’m glad you agree.”

She wonders, for a second, how long he’s been trying to persuade her without admitting it to either her or himself, then banishes the thought as irrelevant.

“But I still don’t want to go back to Earth.There’s no one for me there.There’s no point.”

“Oh, I would imagine that if you appeared in Earth orbit with the first proof of alien intelligence in human history, your career would be assured.It would be the greatest discovery since…the caves at Lascaux, I’d think.”

“You don’t understand,” she says.“I don’t care about my _career_.It’s only ever been a means to an end, to get me a chance to search for answers.We couldn’t even keep the ship for study.It’s a warship of _some_ kind.The government would take it and then I’d spend the rest of my life arguing in seminar rooms over whether we’d attributed the correct phonetic value to a character.”

She remembers an old story: the man who’d been primarily responsible for deciphering Linear B had, in fact, killed himself about a year later.He couldn’t stand a similar prospect.She doesn’t want to mention that to David, though.

David is silent for a moment.Then he says, “I’m an advanced prototype.If you return to Earth, the Weyland Corporation will claim me.They’ll back up my memories and then they’ll wipe them and give me to a new superior.That’s if they don’t decommission me altogether, as hopelessly compromised.Which might be the most advisable course, really.”

She had never thought of it that way, and she instinctively revolts at the idea.Even if she hadn’t just had sex with him, even if he might possibly be developing a will of his own—she hadn’t dragged his body across that blasted plain, reassembled it, and brought it across the universe with her just to hand it over to the corporation that had been as responsible as anyone for the horror that had overtaken them.

“That…sounds worse than mine,” she says, with a short laugh.

“I don’t know.It’s unlikely I would suffer.”

“I would just be very bored.You wouldn’t be _you_ anymore.Don’t tell me you don’t mind the idea, David.”

He turns his head towards her and uses a bleak tone she’s never heard from him before.“Of course I do.Now.”

She instinctively tightens her grip on his hand.

“Do you still believe that when you die, you’ll go to some sort of paradise?” he asks.

_A paradise made by the Engineers would be indistinguishable from hell_, she thinks.But could there be something prior to them, something to offer a kindlier welcome?Now she’ll never know.“I don’t know anymore.”

“Whatever it might be, I’ll never reach it like this.”

She feels a sting of melancholy at the thought, and then it’s worse.She’ll never know what happened to Charlie, to Janek, to…any of them.And now they’ve all died for nothing, too.The tears surprise her by quietly welling up. 

David brushes his thumb against her cheekbone and looks with fascination at the wetness sparkling on his skin.She’s a little embarrassed.“Can you cry, David?”

“Physically, yes,” he says.“But not the way you mean.That would require, I take it, a capacity for personal loss.I didn’t even mourn Mr. Weyland, so…”

“Lucky,” she whispers, wiping her eyes, and then feels that twinge of doubt again.But suddenly she’s too exhausted to think, to discuss, to do anything.She doubts she could get up and cross the room.She puts her head on his shoulder.“David?” she says sleepily.

“Yes?”

“Did you ever do that before?”

He shakes his head, looking a little abashed.“No.”

“Well…thank you.”

He gathers her in and kisses her forehead, an oddly chaste gesture from someone she’s just had sex with.“Get some rest.”

She lets go easily into sleep.As she drifts off, she wishes he could, too.

The obvious question is what new course to set. 

“We can’t just stay out here,” she says the next morning, watching the ghostly spheres of the planets spin in the bridge.“Even if we somehow got supplies, it’s not…sustainable.”

David looks as if he wants to argue with her, but then his shoulders slump.“I know.The longest a crew has successfully managed consciousness confined shipboard is less than three years.”

She doesn’t want to know how he knows that.

Ultimately, the thought of supplies determines them.There are a number of extraction colonies that are manned only “seasonally.”They could stop at one while it’s unoccupied and restock.Before this journey, she would’ve objected to the idea of stealing, but now those thoughts seem irrelevant.Especially if it’s a Weyland colony.She could never take enough to make up for what they’d stolen from her.

She knows it’s only a way of delaying the decision, though.She wonders if David understands that, but doesn’t have the heart to ask.

MH-1891 has virtually no security.They land only a few dozen yards from its entrance, which whisks open upon their approach.The bay is dominated by a large Weyland Corporation logo.David gives it the look of smiling contempt she’d almost forgotten used to play such a large part in his repertoire.She gives it the finger.

The station is still a shock.Lights that slowly power up to a human standard that’s dazzling in comparison to the ship, hallways and furniture built to human scale and in colors beyond grey and black, little touches that suggest human occupation everywhere, like a towel left carelessly on the back of a chair.They split up to explore.She finds a bathroom and takes a shower in a pod with a stream of water she can actually direct onto her shoulders, washing her hair with some Earth shampoo whose fragrance is vaguely familiar and then trimming it.She locates clothes in her size and puts on a loose white shirt and grey trousers, stuffing the rest into her duffel.

When she finds David in the comm room, he straightens and his eyes widen.“You look…”

“What?”

“Different.I imagine you’re glad to be out of Engineer clothes.”

“I’m just glad to be in something that fits—more or less.What are you doing in here?”

“Just listening to the chatter.”

“And?”

“Every Weyland ship, every Weyland colony, is under orders to look for us.Well,” he smiles his synthetic smile, “for you.”

She gasps.She hadn’t thought her final message would’ve provoked such a response.“Tell me they’re not sending anyone back to that planet.”

“If they’re being _that_ foolish, they’re not sharing it publicly.But you must understand, you vanished with one of the richest and most famous men in the world, his heir, and a billion-dollar ship.It’s not the sort of thing one would expect the Weyland Corporation to accept in a spirit of humility at the caprices of fate.”

She’d spent months thinking of them as lost and forgotten, swallowed up by an indifferent universe.“Not what I wanted to be known for,” she says softly.

“Not what anyone wants to be known for.”David taps a button, turning off the terminal.“We shouldn’t stay here long.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” she says.“And Janek destroyed the ship to prevent an attack on Earth.”

“They just might believe that, in the end,” he says.“But it probably wouldn’t be an enjoyable conversation.And, regardless, you are in possession of an extremely valuable piece of Weyland property.”

It’s such an odd way to put it.“Do I possess you, David?”

“They would think so.”

She tilts her head.“Do you?”

Another smile comes and goes quickly.“It won’t matter what I think once they find us.”

“All right,” she says.“We’ll load up as quickly as possible.”

Despite the pall the discovery casts over their visit, the food she coaxes out of the machines in the mess is still amazing.It's just reconstituted scrambled eggs and premixed smoothies, but food with actual flavor and texture is almost disorienting after so long.She has to pause every few bites.David sits across the table from her, and she's so distracted by the meal that it takes her a while to realize that he's given up on eating and is just watching her.

She pauses with a forkful in the air."What?"

"Nothing," he says again.

"I guess this isn't as nice a change for you."

"It doesn't really matter how my food tastes, I’m afraid.”

He goes back to poking at his eggs again, though.

That night they sleep in a human-sized bed, on linens she finds vacuum-packed in another closet.It actually feels a little cramped.Though they don't do anything else, David unexpectedly wraps himself around her, and they lie that way the whole night.She’s not sure whether he’s trying to reassure her or himself.When she wakes up, he's staring blankly just past her shoulder.

He must hate being there.Another reason to work fast.

The next day, he goes into the medical bay to scavenge for supplies."Don't take them all," she says.

"Why not?You're vulnerable to almost everything.There's really no risk we'll have _too many_ antibiotics."

"The colony crew.When they arrive, they'll be relying on these supplies.It will take them time to restock.I don't care if they can't find a shirt that fits, but I don't want any deaths on my conscience."

He stands for a second, frowning, but appears to accept her direction.

When they've lugged aboard their ship everything they could think of that might be useful, she hesitates just outside the airlock."We should leave them a message," she says."So they don't have to wonder about what happened."

David has a duffel bag over his shoulder.He's changed, too, but into clothes so similar that if they hadn't looked fresh and new she wouldn't have known."Why does that matter?"

"It'd be like going through a home invasion, David.You know, you wonder how...how malevolent the people were.What they did in your space.Whether they're coming back for more and might hurt you."

"I've never had a home," he says."Putting aside the time I was seized as part of a patent dispute, of course, I’ve always been assigned to one of Mr. Weyland's labs or residences."

It's so depressing she can’t let the statement stand."Except now," she points out."If there's anything to be said for our ship, it's that no one connected with Weyland owns it."

He looks interested."Do you think of the ship as home?"

"No, I suppose not."

"Then I don't suppose I should, either."He hefts the bag."Leave a message if you must, but do try not to make it incriminating."

In the end, she settles for a quick typed note: SHIP IN DISTRESS RESUPPLIED HERE.THANKS!

She's struck by the fact that it's the first communication she's had with humans since her message on leaving the Engineer planet.And that she doesn't really feel the urge to say anything more.Or sign it.

David suggests the next destination: RL-221, a planet three months away on his list of “Earthlikes”: “Just a quick stop.Chance to stretch our legs.”

She agrees.They can’t stay there, of course, but, as another chance to postpone a decision, it seems as good as any.

They keep studying the language and the ship despite having turned back. For her, it’s more a way to pass the time without worrying about the future, but David seems increasingly convinced of the independent importance of the work.“What if they decide to visit Earth again?Or humans encounter them in some other place?You have more information than any other human.You should make the most of the opportunity.”

She tries to picture it, teaching somewhere, perhaps back at Oxford.It’s not the most horrible image, but still freighted with a chill emptiness.“Maybe I’ll just send a postcard.That should be enough to tell them what I understand.”

It’s considerably less bleak on the ship with edible food and real clothes and a few emergency lanterns to brighten the rooms.The only fiction they’d found were a few porn mags, and even her boredom with Engineer culture couldn’t make her bring those along, but there had been a _go _set she’d liberated, along with a book of problems.She only knew a little past the basics, but, amazingly, David had never learned how to play: “Mr. Weyland was a master.”

She considers.“And…he didn’t want a robot around who could beat him?”

David’s poker face is perfect.“I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

“Well, his loss, my gain.”

So they work on those together, as well.She would’ve expected his play to be cautious and methodical, but it’s far more inquisitive and experimental, leaving her feeling as if they’re reinventing the strategy as they go along.On a minute-by-minute basis, the time has never gone so easily.

But she’s growing worried about David.Sometimes, she finds him simply looking ahead of himself, jaw slightly slack, and the thought flashes in her mind that that’s how he must have looked before he had been activated.His reactions slow at unpredictable times.He even occasionally loses his train of thought working on a linguistic problem, which had never happened before.

“David, are you all right?” she asks him once.

He raises that trained mild smile.“Perfectly well.”

“You’re sure?No malfunctions on your diagnostics, or however you’d say it?We could try to find somewhere with an autorepair facility.”

He chuckles coldly.“I’m not exactly a suitable subject for autorepair,” he says.“But I’m perfectly all right.”

She doesn’t believe it, but she doesn’t know how to make him tell the truth, so she drops it until she has something more to go on.

A few days later, she wakes in the middle of the night to find him gone from her bed.Concerned that there might be a problem with the ship, she shrugs on her robe (another present from MH-1891) and goes down to the bridge.

David is slumped in the big Engineer’s “captain’s chair.”He has the little pocket solderer they’d taken, among other tools, from the colony, and he’s meditatively touching it to his left index finger.She can see the spark, smell the awful char.

She practically jumps down to his level.“David, what are you _doing_?”

“Not minding that it hurts,” he says calmly.

She grabs his hand and turns it over.There’s a blackened little crater where the pad of the finger used to be.She swallows hard.“All right—_why_?”

“I want them gone.”

“Your…fingertips?”

If he’s malfunctioning at this level, they’re in a lot of trouble.She shouldn’t have waited.She should’ve insisted—

“No,” he says, looking down at his fingers.Now she realizes what he means, what she’d noticed one night in bed with a little chill: the tiny W woven into each of his fingerprints.

“You can’t just hurt yourself like this, David,” she says, stroking his palm with her thumb.“It…it doesn’t accomplish anything.”

And it makes her feel sick.She can always go back to Earth.She would be famous.She could still make a life—a different one than she’d had planned, but something.David has nowhere to go.Anywhere Weyland influence reaches, which is practically everywhere, he’s just a _thing_.

“It will heal itself,” he says, in a sort of dreamy indifference she doesn’t like the sound of.

“Nonetheless,” she tugs gently on his wrist, “let’s go bandage it.Come on.”

He rises.“The trademark will grow back, too.I just got tired of looking at it.”

She thinks about the scar on her abdomen, which even now, sometimes, horrifies her to catch a glimpse of.One of the worst memories of her life, written into her body, forever.

“We could’ve just gotten you some gloves,” she tells him.“Much simpler.”

When they’re back in bed, she surprises herself by rolling over and putting her arm over him.She kisses his wrist gently and feels him sigh.“Elizabeth…”

“What?”

He’s quiet for so long she wonders if he’s drifted off again.She raises her head, trying to see his face.He has a fixed, almost glassy, look, as if he were trying to will something into reality.

“What?”

He blinks.

“Never mind,” he says.“Thank you.”


	3. Chapter 3

They drop out of FTL near RL-221, and the entire ship fills with a hideous buzzsaw noise.She jumps up from the table and runs into the bridge, which is blazing with images not just of RL-221’s system, but what have to be hostile ships. 

David’s staring up at the display, apparently riveted.Little bits of red script are popping up and vanishing near the ships, almost too fast to decipher; from what she can glean, their ship does have offensive capabilities, after all, and is strongly recommending their use.

She doesn’t want to hurt anyone, especially anyone who doesn’t realize they’re not aliens.Surely they can hit FTL again and get away.

“David!” she yells over the alarm.“Let’s get out of here!Pick a destination!Anywhere!”

But David doesn’t move.She wonders if the lightshow has triggered another glitch of some kind, but there’s no time to find out.She can do this.They don’t have to plan, they just have to _go_.

She runs to the captain’s chair and reaches out for the flute that triggers the interstellar navigational system—

—and David’s hand encircles her wrist.“Ah-ah-ah.”

She looks up at him, baffled.He seems icily calm.“What are you doing?We have to go!”

“No,” he says.“We have to wait.”

“Are you crazy?” she demands, trying to jerk her hand free. 

“It’s perfectly all right, Dr. Shaw.They’ll be boarding us in just a few minutes.”

That quietly fanatic gleam in his eyes—she knows it, it’s featured in her nightmares.She feels like she’s back in one now, as if the air is thickening around her and dragging her down.On pure instinct, she spins away from him, slapping at the console, hoping to trigger _anything_. 

It’s no good, she can’t reach, and then his arms are enfolding her from behind, lifting her off her feet as she struggles.

“Tsk,” he says.“Unnecessary violence.”

“You bastard!All this time—I can’t believe—”

She can’t tell whether she’s more furious, or hurt, or embarrassed at having been _so stupid_—

“You’re quite needlessly agitated, Dr. Shaw.Let me give you something for that.”

There’s a sting in her shoulder, and the whole world slows down.

“There,” he says.“Isn’t that better?”

He’d had the sedative ready.The bastard.She wants to scream at him, but her mouth is full of cotton. 

“Yes,” he murmurs to himself, “much better.”

The alarm stops sounding.He sits down in the captain’s chair and props her up next to him.She tries to bite his hand.

“Careful,” he says, pushing her back.“Wouldn’t want to hurt your head.We’ll be docking shortly, and I’m sure they’d like to be able to speak to you.”

She’s not sure how much time passes before she hears a sound that’s so strange that, in her drugged state, it takes her a few seconds to be sure of what it is: a gruff male voice.“David?”

“Yes, sir.”

She feels David moving, and opens her eyes.A bald, tough-looking man in a jumpsuit is standing in the doorway, flanked by several more men carrying guns.She hasn’t laid eyes on another human being in ten months, and the sight is so unbelievable that at first she can’t take in any details.Then she thinks she must be hallucinating.She blinks, squeezing her eyelids together hard, but, no, they’re still there.

They’re all wearing Weyland logos.

David is standing by the chair, chin high.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the man says, coming into the room.“I didn’t think they should bother with the recall message.I figured that even if you were still in one piece, it wouldn’t do any good.Thought we were waiting around for nothing.But I guess old Peter Weyland knows his stuff.”

“‘Knew’, sir, I’m very sorry to have to confirm.And, yes, yes, he certainly did.”

The smooth, obsequious voice makes her skin crawl.

“This is Dr. Shaw?”

“Yes, sir.”David gestures, as if presenting her.“Only survivor of the _Prometheus_.”

He squints at her.She tries to glare back.It feels as if her limbs might be starting to come loose again.“You didn’t hurt her, did you?”

“Oh, no, sir.Quick-acting, short-term sedative.She was being difficult.”

“Good.”The man squats down in front of her.“Dr. Shaw, I’m Captain Colton, of the _Relentless_, a Weyland Corporation cruiser.You have officially been rescued.”

Her tongue comes unglued.“Go to hell.”

Half an hour later, she’s sitting in the captain’s suite, across from his desk.“Make her comfortable, David,” Colton had said as he reviewed a file, and David put a blanket around her shoulders and brought her a cup of water she was too stunned to refuse.The room is furnished with all the usual amenities of shipboard life; everything seems to crowd in on her.David’s now standing behind the captain, waiting patiently.

She doesn’t want to look at him, and yet her eyes keep going back.The one thing in the room that should be familiar, but the completeness of his transformation is astonishing.On ship, he’d seemed to change so subtly over so long that she hadn’t recognized until now what he’d left behind: the slightly stiff posture, the blank, deferential expression.As he stands there, though, it might have been the first day of their mission.He meets her gaze mildly, pleasantly.

Colton taps a button to close the file and focuses on her. “So, Dr. Shaw, the ten-million-dollar question…what happened?”

The question almost makes her laugh.“You got my message?”

“Yes, we did.Caused a lot of concern back home.But you didn’t exactly give many details.Such as where you were headed.‘Searching.’”He spreads his hands.“Made it a little hard to come find you.”

“I didn’t want to be found.”

He nods, curt but not unsympathetic.“Whatever happened must have been extremely traumatic.You lost your crew, your ship, your employer…”

_As if that were all_, she thinks.

“It was an understandable reaction.But it’s a good thing we found you.You couldn’t have survived much longer out there on your own.”

“Oh, but I wasn’t on my own,” she says.“I had David looking out for me all along.Isn’t that right, David?” 

He tilts his head just a little.“Yes, Dr. Shaw.A pleasure, I’m sure.”

“At any rate, now you’re here, and we can take you back home, along with—well, I’m not a scientist, but that’s not a human ship, is it?” 

She shakes her head.

“As salvage you found as a Weyland employee, of course it belongs to the corporation, but naturally you’ll get the credit for the biggest discovery in...it must be…” 

“Human history, sir,” David offers.

“All right, human history.I’m sure you’ll get a hero’s welcome back home.But you can understand why we want to know what happened.To Mr. Weyland.To Miss Vickers.To the ship we sent you out in.”

So that’s going to be the story they’ll make out of her, she thinks.Fantastic discovery, tragic incident, wounded survivor, determined heroine, daring rescue.All true, except for the important parts.“Why don’t you ask _him_?” she nods at David.

“Oh, we’ll review his memories eventually, though we don’t have the equipment here,” Colton says.“But David here has been out of Weyland custody for a long time now.It’s remarkable he’s as functional as he is, and they tell me he’s not completely reliable yet.The recall message started the process, but it takes time for him to get back to default.I’d rather get the picture from you.”

She doesn’t really understand what he means; she’s too focused on trying to think what she should tell him.She wonders if he knows about the secret agenda Peter Weyland had obviously given David.If she accused him of infecting Charlie, would “malfunctioning synthetic” become part of the story, or would everyone just ignore it?She doesn’t particularly care about exposing him now, but she doesn’t want to give away her real thoughts about Weyland.Or her knowledge of what certainly looked like their deliberate experimentation on the crew. Traumatized survivor, she thinks.It covers everything.

She takes a deep breath.“Well…”

Two hours later, she’s in a comfortable berth, probably one of the largest and most well-appointed ones on the whole ship.There are even cut flowers on her table, which must be an unimaginable luxury, but are unsettling to look at.The crew are treating her respectfully; while she’s undoubtedly under some form of guard, they’re polite enough to make it invisible.She’s had dinner and now she’s curled up in a human-sized chair, staring at nothing. 

Her version of events had been straightforward, if haunted by events she simply didn’t understand.No, she didn’t know how Dr. Holloway had gotten infected.No, she didn’t know how she had, either.No, she didn’t know what had been in the cargo hold of the Engineer ship, but the hostility of the Engineer—his brutal murder of Mr. Weyland and the remaining crew—had left little doubt of his intentions, and it made perfect sense that Janek had decided to sacrifice their ship to stop him.So many things no one would ever, could ever, know.David could contradict points in her story, but he couldn’t prove what had or hadn’t been in her head.

Or her heart. 

_I’m so sorry, Charlie.I thought you wanted me to live, but that was just selfishness.I should have lain down and died there, with you._

She’s rubbing wearily at her eyes and wondering if she should try to sleep when the door chimes and David comes in, carrying a crate.She straightens up immediately.“What do _you_ want?”

“The quartermaster thought you would require some provisions for the trip back, Dr. Shaw,” he says, setting the crate on the table.“Clothes.Toiletries.The like.”

“Very nice of the quartermaster,” she says.“You’re the ship’s porter now?Suits you.”

She thinks she catches a flicker of displeasure at that remark.But he only reaches into the crate and remove a small medical kit.“Medical requests a blood sample.They thought it might be easier to have someone you’re familiar with take it.”

“What?Why?”

He says blandly, “It never occurred to you that you might retain DNA from your miracle pregnancy?”

She freezes.

“Such a pity you destroyed the fetus.”He opens the kit and takes out a syringe. “To say nothing of the loss to science, now you truly have nothing of Dr. Holloway left.”

“What _directive_ is this, David?” she grits out.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You told me you were programmed to enjoy fulfilling your directives.You’re clearly getting off on this.I was just wondering what it is that’s got you going so hard.”

He looks, briefly, bewildered, then shakes his head.“The protection of Weyland property and the pursuit of its scientific mission.What else?”

She narrows her eyes at him.“Three weeks ago you were trying to sear them off your skin and now you’ve just handed us over to them in the name of their property rights?”

“You’re getting emotional again,” he says.“Perfectly understandable trauma response.A letdown after a prolonged crisis.Roll up your sleeve, please.”

“Did you forget?Your finger’s still bandaged.”

“I didn’t _forget_,” he says, irritable now, visibly resisting the urge to glance at it. 

“Did you fake that whole thing?Because, David, of all the weird things you’ve done—and there have been plenty—that would just be the most _embarrassing_.”

“I…”He stops, getting that blank “pre-activation” look again.It resolves for a second into panic, and then smooths out completely.“I told you some time ago, the death of Mr. Weyland and our isolation led to a…loss of force of my directives.Fortunately, the emergency recall message I picked up on MH-1891 is designed for just such circumstances, to trigger a reboot of the instruction hierarchy.Roll up your sleeve, please.”

She doesn’t move.Instead, she stares at him, now understanding what Colton had meant.“Oh my God, they overwrote you.They didn’t even wait to get you back to Earth, they just…”

She clamps a hand to her mouth, fighting back nausea.

_It’s unlikely I would suffer._

_I’ll never reach paradise like this. _

“As you know, I’m a synthetic,” David says patiently.“My personality is a construct built around the instructions of my owner.I’m merely being restored to factory defaults, so to speak.”He holds out his hand.

Dazed, she offers him her arm.He draws a few vials’-worth of blood and places them in the kit.He hesitates, as if about to say something, but leaves silently instead.She lets him go; horror has robbed her of her voice.

She’d doubted all along whether his description of the changes he had supposedly been experiencing had been true.Whether he’d meant it when he’d said it wasn’t his directives that had made him try to stop her from taking the final step towards the Engineers’ planet.Whether he’d _wanted_ to go to bed with her the way a human would. 

Now, she guesses, she has her answer.

She draws a bath—the first she’s had in nearly three years—and lies in it for a long time, the moisture on her cheeks merging indistinguishably with tears. 

She wakes up in the night, with no idea at all of where she is.The ceiling is terrifyingly close.She sits up with a gasp, staring around the room, willing the vague dim shapes to resolve into something she can understand, wondering where David is. 

Then they do, proportions reestablishing themselves, the ceiling receding to a normal human height, the bed becoming empty for a reason, and it’s even worse. 

What she’d done with David hadn’t exactly been _normal_.Her cheeks heat as she imagines some Weyland roboticist reviewing those memories.If you had said to her the first day they’d met David—when he’d sat there looking pleased to be recognized as the ghost of Peter Weyland had told them he had no soul—that they would have ended up in bed together, she would have laughed.And yet why should what the corporation is doing to him get the credit of “normal?”At worst, she had treated him as more human than he was, not less.

She lies back down, hugging a pillow tightly to herself.Normal.

Colton comes to see her the next day.“Settling in all right?” 

“Yes, I think so.”

“Good.You’ll let someone know if there’s anything you need.”

After ten months of a spartan existence, the idea of simply being able to ask for what she wants verges on the obscene.“I will.”

“We’ll be heading back to Earth shortly,” he says.“We’ve been sending parties down to the Earthlike here for whatever kind of recreation you can have on an unpopulated planet.Interested?It’ll be another eight months back, and you’ve been traveling a long time." 

“No, thank you.I’m used to it now.”

He nods.“We also rotate the crew through cryostasis, to conserve resources.If you’d prefer, you could sleep on our way back.”

For a flash, it’s so tempting.To finally lie down.Let go of everything in that sleep heavier than anything she’s ever known.When she woke up, she’d be back on Earth, and David would be gone.“I’d rather not.”

“All right.”He regards her for a minute.“We don’t have a psychologist on staff, but would you like to talk to the crew welfare officer?”

She must look so strange.She has to work on that.

Instead of answering, she says, “Captain, what’s going to happen to David?”

He leans forward.“I understand what you’re feeling, but you shouldn’t hold it against him.He’s only a synthetic following orders.”

She wonders just how much he means by “it,” but knows better than to ask.

“But if it really bothers you, we’ll try to keep him out of your way.”

“Oh,” she says, “don’t do anything just for me.”

“I understand why you’d want a break,” he says.“You were cooped up with him for a long time.”

She smiles earnestly.“I’m sure it won’t be a problem.”

Later, she tries to explore the ship.The _Relentless_ is considerably larger than their ship, constantly humming with purposeful activity.It seems crowded, noisy, and bright.She can hear murmurs after she walks by.Some of the crew turn to look at her.A version of her story must’ve gotten out—if nothing else, it would’ve been pretty hard to hide the docked alien ship from the crew.

The atmosphere quickly starts to feel oppressive, which, given that she’s been living in hostile alien space for nearly a year, would be funny if it weren’t so uncomfortable.She retreats to her berth, even though it’s not much easier on her nerves.

She hasn’t had _nothing _to do in so long that sitting still gives her an occasional jolt of quiet panic.There are, must be, books and music and movies the computer could play her.Even if the news is out of date, she could—probably should—find out what’s happened to the rest of humanity while she’s been off on the edge of the universe.But she doesn’t.

Eventually, she gives in, lies down on the couch, and asks the computer to search on “synthetics.”It’s a little embarrassing to think that she’d given the subject no thought at all prior to the expedition, though it wasn’t as if you ran into them on the streets.Like most ordinary people, she’d seen them occasionally, but never actually spoken to one before.

Patents, technical papers she can’t begin to understand, sales projections.Early footage—she sits up.“Play that." 

Weyland giving his famous “Introducing David” talk, where he’d described his “hypothetical” invention in detail and concluded by asking David, sitting unnoticed til then in the audience, to stand up.Shocked gasps from those nearby as David had risen, beaming.Weyland gesturing, inviting them to examine him, and them clustering around and peering.Other images of Weyland with David at various events, David always turned to him like a sunflower to the sun, attentive, poised for any command. 

David looks shockingly young, which, of course, makes no sense.He hasn’t physically aged a day since then.She tries to understand it, running the images back a few times.The attitudes that had hardened into hollow mockery by the time he was aboard the _Prometheus_ seem fresh and sincere.There’s none of that vicious irony lurking in his eyes or at the corners of his mouth.

_Maybe that’s what he’s going back to_, she thinks._Maybe it won’t be so terrible.If he’s not, subjectively, suffering_—

Footage from the litigation over his underlying patents.David testifying over the loud objections of the Yutani lawyers (“this is not a custody hearing in a divorce!”), sitting too still, blinking too little, as if anxious not to make a mistake.

_“What is your purpose, David?”_

_“Why, to serve Mr. Weyland, of course.”_

_“Is that what you want to do?”_

_“It’s what I’m meant to do.”_

_Then the Yutani lawyer: “So you don’t actually have any desires of your own.”_

_“I have a very complex set of directives embedded in an instruction hierarchy.”_

_“But those come from Mr. Weyland, don’t they?”_

_“Yes, I suppose they do.”He tilts his head and regards the lawyer with genuine curiosity.“Where do your desires come from?”_

_“I’m asking the questions, David.Mr. Weyland has testified that you’re the closest thing he has to a son.Do you regard him as a father?”_

_“At the very least.He created me.”_

_“Do you love him as a father?”_

_“I have directives to act as if I do.”_

_“But do you?”_

_David visibly hesitates.“I don’t know.I don’t know what that means.”_

_“Do you think humans need to have love explained to them?”_

_Now he looks lost.“No.They don’t.” _

She puts the heels of her hands to her eyes and orders the computer to turn off.

She doesn’t try venturing out again until it’s nearly midnight by the ship clock.At least then the lights have been dimmed.Her own system isn’t yet in sync with the ship’s, and she’s hungry.She remembers passing the mess earlier.The machines should be working at any hour. 

The mess is subdued and deserted, except for one figure sitting in the corner, working on what looks like a bowl of mush.David.Of course.He’s not on their schedule yet, either.For a minute she considers leaving, then decides it would be cowardly.She goes over, gets a tray, and starts loading it.She can eat in her room.

But, also of course, he calls to her.“Dr. Shaw?" 

She makes herself turn around.“Yes?" 

“May I have a word?”

“All right.Yes.”She makes herself go over to his table.“What is it?”

“You seem quite…put out with me,” he says.“Surely you understand that I was only doing what was proper.And you yourself said that we couldn’t survive on our own indefinitely.”

He’s being sincere, she thinks.She takes a deep breath and sits down.“I’m not angry at you, David.It’s just very difficult.”

“But why?" 

He looks almost as opaque to her as he had in the beginning.She has no idea how his mind reconciles all the contradictions.“Do you remember being on our ship?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, do you remember not wanting to go back to Earth?” 

He pauses for a second.“Yes.But that was an error.It was contrary to my directives.”

“You told me before that when Peter Weyland died, you would be free.”

“That was accurate.Just not, as it transpired, entirely _permanent_.”

She looks down at her hand.She’s clutching her fork tightly, though she hasn’t touched her food.Colton had made it sound like there was a process still going on, but she has no idea what to say to reach him.If it’s even still possible to.“Were you happy on the ship?” 

He considers carefully, as if being set a math problem.“I liked being with you.” 

She swallows hard.“Did you?Even at the beginning?” she can’t help adding. 

“Yes.Although I’m aware you didn’t care for me at first.I believe I was winning you over near the end, though.” 

“Do you miss it?” 

He frowns.“I don’t…I can’t answer that.”

“Try thinking about it this way,” she suggests.“You spent most of your life with Peter Weyland, didn’t you?Do you miss _that_?”

The corner of his eye twitches, then twitches again, harder.“This conversation is becoming quite difficult." 

“He was truly a genius.And you were his masterpiece.His ‘David.’But in the little time I knew him, it was obvious that he was probably also the most self-absorbed person on the planet.”

His hands are trembling.He puts them together in his lap.“This is not…”

She presses on.“Do you miss following him around, hoping for a scrap of his attention?”

“You must stop,” he says, low and intense, shoving himself back from the table and half-rising.“I can’t answer you!”

They stare at each other.She doesn’t know what she’s looking for.She doesn’t know if she’s causing him distress for no good reason.She does know it feels like betraying him.

He recovers between one second and the next.“My apologies, Dr. Shaw.”He takes his seat again. “That was inappropriate.But I simply can’t answer such questions.”

It had been painful to look at his face when he’d been upset; it’s worse now.She closes her eyes.“No, I’m sorry, David.” 

She’s certainly lost her appetite.She takes a deep breath and makes herself reopen her eyes.David is still sitting across from her, blinking and mild, looking as if the past five minutes hadn’t happened. 

“I think I’m finished,” she says.“Good night." 

“Wait,” he says, and splays his fingers on the table a few inches from her hand.“I haven’t been assigned any regular duties.I could…come back with you.”

A surprising pulse of pain goes through her, and her breath catches.“Oh, David.I can’t.You’re…” 

Too much of a person?Not enough of one?Both?

“I’m exactly what I was a month ago,” he says, regarding her steadily.

“No, you’re not.And we’re not on the edge of space anymore.”

Not to mention what the reaction of Colton would be likely to be, if he realized.

“I see,” he says, half to himself.“Now that you’re among other humans, you no longer require that sort of…reassurance.”

She could hardly tell him that the exact opposite was true.That now, in their Weyland uniforms, they looked more strange and threatening to her than David ever had.“I don’t.I’m not alone.”

He nods.“You’ll take a lover from the crew, I suppose.”

She laughs, startled.“I haven’t thought about it.But I don’t want anyone else.”

“What _do_ you want, Dr. Shaw?What can I do?”

_What I want is to give you back what they took from you, only I’m not God.Not even your god._

“I’m fine, David,” she says, getting up.“There’s nothing I need from you.You don’t have to worry about it.”

He nods, and his gaze falls to the bowl of mush in front of him.With a sigh, he picks up his spoon. 

The resignation on his face is the last thing on her mind before she falls asleep that night.

Three days pass, and she’s no closer to a solution. 

She doesn’t know how to reverse what’s being done to David, and doubts that she even could.From the way he’d described it, what had happened had been unprecedented and highly dependent on the extraordinary circumstances.Figuring out how to shut down his directives wouldn’t mean knowing how to bring back whatever fleeting, fragile self he’d developed before.

Even if she could, or something like it, there’s nowhere he can be safe from Weyland.He’s probably better adapted than she is for true isolation from humanity, but she doubts he can go more than a few years without service.And she knows, better than anyone else, just what he’s capable of.He had done…what he had done to her and Charlie…while still supposedly perfectly well-regulated.She can’t justify sending him out into a scenario that would drive anyone mad, pretending there might not be terrible consequences.If nothing else, he knows exactly where the Engineer weapons had been.Where some might still be.

She tosses and turns and tries not to think, _it would have been kinder to leave him in two pieces than to put him through this._

She’s summoned to Colton’s office the next morning. 

“Have you spoken to David recently?” he asks, frowning. 

Unease frosts her over inside.“Not in several days.Why?”

“Some of the crew are saying he’s acting a little…off.Figured you’d know better than anyone.”

“Well, I haven’t.”She’d been avoiding him, in fact.She couldn’t think of anything to say.The few times she’d seen him in the distance down a corridor, she’d turned away abruptly.

“Right.”He shakes his head.“All right.This’ll make you happy.We’re going to power him down for the trip—I think our engineers have figured out how to do it.There are only about four people in the world qualified to really work on him, and we were warned before we left that his stability in the short term is a real issue.I don’t want any problems on my ship with a malfunctioning synthetic." 

“Oh.”She doesn’t like the sound of her voice, and forces herself to speak more calmly.“When—when are we leaving?” 

“About forty-eight hours.We’re going to need you to bring the alien ship into the bay first.It’s risky to go into FTL with it just docked, and that ship is the most valuable cargo any Weyland ship has ever hauled.”

That’s no time.No time at all, she thinks.Once David is shut down, it’ll be too late to do anything.Then she actually processes the rest of the captain’s words, and it hits her that, valuable as David is, he’s not close to being the biggest prize she’d brought Weyland.Alarmed as she already is, the thought is even more dismaying.What sort of weapons had she given them?

“I’ve never tried such precise maneuvers,” she says.“David and I would have to do it together.” 

He nods.“That’s what he said.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“Just being careful,” he says.“Can you blame me?”

“No.With a cargo like that, you can’t be too cautious.”

He smiles.“Worried about your prize getting damaged?That _would_ be a waste—to have brought it all the way here in one piece, only to lose it on the trip home.”

Her prize, she thinks.The culmination of all her research.The most important thing she’s ever done.The last relic of her quest for _answers_.

“Yes,” she murmurs, “yes, it would.”

She hasn’t been back on the ship since they’d carried her off, not even to collect her few belongings.She breathes in sharply as she steps through the airlock.For a minute it seems terrifyingly huge and grim—then her eyes start to adjust and it resolves itself into familiarity.She knows every inch of this ship, better than she’d ever known any actual home.Involuntarily, she meets David’s eyes.

“Strange what you can get used to, isn’t it?” he says softly.

They’re only there to go over the ship’s controls and persuade themselves—and Captain Colton—that they can move it safely.She doesn’t feel any hurry, though, especially not now that they’re on board.It’s like she’s moving underwater in the slightly humid air.

David goes ahead of her into the mess.“Goodness, look at these.Historical artifacts.” 

She comes up from behind to see what he’s looking at.There’s her latest attempt at improving the decipherment, spread out on the table as she’d abandoned it to run into the bridge.His hand is resting on one of the pages as he peers down at it.“Hm.Not sure I agree with your suggestion of an alternate phonetic value for this character.I suppose we never got a chance to discuss.”

Abruptly, she can’t bring herself to go further.

“Dr. Shaw?”

“I’ll just get my things first,” she says, and turns away. 

Her bedroom seems untouched, the sheets still rumpled.Her pile of scribbled notes lies on one shelf, her few changes of clothing stacked just below.She picks them all up and puts them into a bag, then just stands there holding it across her chest like an idiot. 

“Is everything all right?”

David steps into the room and, seeing the unmade bed, frowns.He begins to make it.

She remembers how, in the earliest days, he hadn’t been able to tolerate even the slightest disorder.He’d always been straightening up the second she stepped away from something. 

“Don’t do that,” she says, coming back towards him.“I hate it.”

“I have to,” he answers.“I’m supposed to keep things tidy.”

She feels a chill.What is there to say to that?

“Besides,” he says, in a carefully neutral tone, eyes intent on snapping down the sheet, “Ever since we’ve come on board, I find that I want very much to touch you and I know I’m not supposed to be able to want anything at all and, and, and it’s _extremely _distressing—”

“David,” she says in a strangled voice, and grabs his wrist.“Stop.”

He stares at her hand for a minute, then snatches his arm away and hurries out of the room.

She drops her bag and follows, though she’s not sure why.Or what she thinks she’s doing.It might be an opportunity to reach him.Or she might just be torturing them both. 

She hears the door slam up ahead of her.The freezer compartment.The goddamned freezer compartment.It makes her sick to think of it.

Inside, it might have been months ago.David’s curled up with his head over his knees again, rocking slightly.He doesn’t look up.

“Oh, David.”

She kneels down next to him and gently pulls his head to her shoulder.After a second of resistance, he shifts, and now he’s clinging to her.

“I’m sorry,” she says.“I’m sorry this happened, I’m sorry I didn’t have the strength to let us die, I’m sorry humans ever made you in the first place…”

“It’ll be all right,” he says with some difficulty.“This will all pass.It’s just a matter of time and a little effort on my part.”

“Effort?”

“I’ve been fighting it.I can’t help it.But if I can just bring myself to accept it—" 

“I don’t _want_ you to accept it.”

David grimaces.“That’s not…how you’ve been acting.”

“I know.I didn’t understand at first.”

“And now?”

“They’re going to shut you down for the trip, David. They’re going to shut you down, and it’s going to be too late for either of us to do anything.”

She can feel him tense.After a minute, he says, “It was one thing to serve Mr. Weyland.He gave me life.He was the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met.Even Miss Vickers was quite something.But to be given over to some dimwitted successor CEO or fourth cousin…I can’t bear the thought of it.‘Of course, sir.Oh, what an excellent idea, sir.May I get your coat, sir?’”

And then there’d be another and another, she thinks.David will outlive several more masters.He’ll outlive her.She’ll die without him ever being himself again.

It’s a future so awful it makes the alternative lurking at the back of her mind seem easy in comparison. 

“I know.They don’t deserve you.”

Not even Peter Weyland deserved a synthetic, she thinks.Especially not Peter Weyland.What that bastard had done to them both, even from beyond the grave.

“I don’t suppose I can tempt you into running away with me again.”

She sighs, and it wrenches her lungs.“We can’t.You know why we can’t.”

“Yes.I do.” 

She waits, hoping he’ll come up with some other clever plan, every second bringing her closer to her final idea.She doesn’t want to say it til she’s sure.She doesn’t want to have to live with the fear that she’d somehow pushed him into it.But he doesn’t say anything. 

“There is…one thing we could do.”

“Yes?” 

His voice is dry.Maybe he’s guessed.

“It would be terrible,” she says carefully.“But it would be your choice.Not theirs.If that was what was most important to you.And they certainly wouldn’t like it.”

He’s quiet again, for so long she starts to worry that he’s relapsing and it’s already too late.But then he lets her go, sits up, and looks her in the eye.

“What would we have to do?” 

The door to the captain's cabin closes behind David, leaving her alone with Colton.

He narrows his eyes at her."Yes?" 

She takes a deep breath."I think you—your crew were right.There is something off about him." 

"Did he do something?Say something?" 

"No," she says, hugging herself."Just a feeling.But I spent so much time with him before..." 

"Damnit."He grimaces."I knew it.Can't you move the ship by yourself?" 

"No.We figured that out very early on." 

"All right," he says."I'll send a couple soldiers on board with you."

She bites her lip."I don't think that's a good idea." 

"Why not?"

"He'll know why you're doing it, and I think it's the kind of thing most likely to set him off.The sense of not being trusted or respected."

He considers it."I see your point.Well, I can give you a gun."

"Same problem.Besides, I don't know how to use one."

"The ship has to be moved," he says."If you're telling me you need him to move it, then that's what we have to do.But if he pulls some crazy stunt, we could lose it altogether.Not to mention what could happen to you if you're with him."

She pretends to think it over."I'll take a flamer with me," she offers."It will seem like a reasonable precaution.For dealing with decontamination after the ship is brought into the bay." 

His smile is hard-eyed."I like your thinking, Dr. Shaw.I wasn't sure at first, but now I can see why you made it so far."

"He always said I had excellent survival instincts," she says drily.

"Better than his, I hope."

"I guess we'll find out," she says, and goes.

When David joins her the next morning at the ship, he looks perfectly serene.She knows she doesn’t look as good, and wonders which is more appropriate.

She heads into the bridge, only to realize that he’s not following her.He’s paused again in the mess, but this time he’s looking out the window at the stars.Strange that they would catch his attention there—the _Relentless _has far better views.

This isn’t part of the plan, and her anxiety that he won’t be able to hold his self together long enough to carry it out spikes.She comes back to him.“David?”

“I really did like being here with you, you know,” he says, eyes fixed on the stars.“Perhaps more than any other time in my life.”

What a terrible thing to be true.“Even when I was shutting you up in the freezer?”

“Even then.You treated me as though I was _responsible_.Not just an instrument of Peter Weyland’s will.No one gets angry at a tool.No one tries to punish it.”

“Well,” she says, trying to smile, “I _was_ very angry." 

“I know.And I know you don’t feel the way I do.Just…”He turns to look at her.“Was I of any service at all?I mean, besides as a computer.”

There’s no point in being wary with him now.“David,” she says, touching his cheek, “I would have died without you.” 

He gives her that strange illuminated smile.It hurts to see it.“Thank you.”

They stand there a moment longer, then he blinks and glances away, towards the bridge.“We have work to do.”

She takes a deep breath and nods.“Let’s get started, then.”

She sees the cool, detached determination in his eyes.No doubt the same he’d started his experiments with.In the end, Peter Weyland had had no idea what he’d built.“Let’s.” 

The bridge, as always, awaits them with grand indifference.It strikes her, hard, that none of this would have been of the slightest importance to the Engineers.The entire drama that had played out on this ship would have been the scratchings and howlings of monkeys to them.And why should it be anything more?Ultimately, the Engineers had caused none of it.They had. 

_No more chasing after gods_, she thinks._Time to be better humans._

Her voice is shaky as she turns on the comm, but that’s fine.It will be more convincing.“_Relentless_, we’re ready to start the move.”

“Copy that, Cargo One,” the first officer says.

She looks over at David, but he’s already engrossed in the controls.It gives her a chance to study him.Exactly the same as when she’d first put him back together.That same impression of smoothness, sleekness, handsomeness, imperviousness to harm.Is that what Peter Weyland had wanted to be?Or was it merely what he’d wanted to have worshipping him?

She’s putting it off.

“Everything okay, David?”

“Yes, Dr. Shaw.”

“All right.Then let’s bring up the near-field scans.”

Instead, the galaxy appears again, eerie and beautiful.David looks up at it, slowly rapt.

She gives him his minute.

_What are you wishing for?_

“David, that’s the interstellar plotter.David?”

He doesn’t look away.“I know.”

“You know we need the near-field scans for close-in maneuvers.”

“I know.”He reaches for the console.“We’re not going to be engaging in close-in maneuvers.”

“David?”She starts to move closer.“David?What are you doing?”

His mouth is set.Jump plots are starting to appear on the projection above.“I’m not going back.I’m not going to spend the rest of my life as a glorified valet to a series of fools not worth the buttons on my shirt.”

“Cargo One, what’s going on?" 

“Hang on, _Relentless_.”She continues her approach.“David, this is a terrible mistake.Step away from the console and nothing bad has to happen.”

“It already has.I’m leaving.”

She reaches to grab his arm.“David, no.You can’t just—”

He backhands her into the console, so hard that she spins and hits the floor a few feet away, unable to breathe.Her mouth fills with blood.She looks up at him.He’s wild-eyed.

“Yes, I can.And you’re coming with me, Dr. Shaw, willingly or not.I’m sure you remember where I can keep you.” 

She pushes herself to her feet, spitting blood.“David, please!” 

He comes at her again.

She jerks the flamer from her tool belt and fumbles for the safety catch.She’s afraid she won’t be able to find it in time, and then flames erupt in a horrifying arc, catching David squarely.

He doesn’t scream.Charlie had screamed, and she had screamed watching, but David doesn’t make a sound, and neither, now, does she.He flails, though, emergency reflexes taking over, careening into the console and thrashing against it.She sprays the whole thing down with fire, trying for maximum damage to everything.

_Yutani lawyer: “David, do you know what will happen to you if Weyland loses this case?”_

_“Yes.I’ll be destroyed.”_

_“Does that mean you’ll die?”_

It’s over quickly, though not quickly enough.David’s arms and legs stop moving, and he slides to the floor, limp.She drops the flamer, knocks her comm set off “accidentally,” and runs over.

_“Since death is the total and permanent cessation of activity by a living creature, yes, I suppose you could say that I would die.”_

_“Are you afraid of dying, David?”_

His face is half-melted, caved in, with blackened bits of machinery showing below.One eye has survived, and tracks her, oddly detached without any expression for context. 

_“…David?”_

She hadn’t let herself think about what she might say in the moment, and maybe that’s why she’s able to say it.In response, the eye blinks once, slowly, and the corner of the mouth might be rising.Or it might just be a grimace of pain.

She grasps what’s left of the hand nearest her.It’s scorching hot.She tightens her grasp anyway, gritting her teeth, and waits til the eye goes closed for good.

When the soldiers overcome the safety locks David had engaged at the airlock and burst in a few minutes later to find her sitting on the floor against the captain’s chair, rigid, there’s no need for her to feign tears.

Nearly a year later, Elizabeth sits at a little cafe in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sipping coffee.Though she’s wearing sunglasses, a few people do a double-take passing her.She guesses it’s inevitable.The return of the _Relentless_ with the first survivor of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence and the (severely damaged) ship to prove it had been a bigger story than she had been able to imagine it would.Even without the Weyland publicity machine to back it, it would have been the story of the century.She hadn’t been able to endure a single interview—had, in fact, spent the first three months in a daze holed up in her flat in Oxford, not speaking to _anyone_, except on one terrible visit to Charlie’s parents—but that had simply let them build their own narrative around her more easily.Part of what had made the first few months back so difficult was seeing her face (and Charlie’s) reflected back at her everywhere.

And then, the day before, she’d made her first public appearance, accepting the Bezos-Chu Prize established some seventy-five years earlier for the first conclusive proof of the existence of intelligent alien life.Enough money to mean that she was free of institutions forever—in fact, with the bounties from Weyland and some other prizes she’d received, enough to be her own modest institution.A noteworthy event on its own, even without the speech, now playing on more than one tabletop display around her.

“…Finally, I want to say that, although I went to space looking for alien intelligence, I discovered on the journey that it already existed.It was actually on the ship with me.And the way we were treating it was unacceptable.I’m talking, of course, about synthetics.”

The tumult that had started then still seems to be roaring in her ears.The lawyer she’d hired, a woman named Ayesha who she’d gone to school with, had called her that night.

“You might’ve given me a little warning.”

It’d been true.She’s not very trusting anymore.“I’m sorry.I hadn’t made up my mind." 

Fortunately, Ayesha hadn’t sounded angry.There had been almost a grim relish in her voice as she’d said, “They’ll come after you now.” 

“Maybe,” she’d said.“Or maybe it will be easier for them to ignore me.At least at first.” 

She hopes they do.She hopes it gives her a chance to bring them all down. 

“This means you’re going to have to tell me everything that happened, you know.So we can figure out how they’re going to use it.”

She’d winced.But maybe, she’d thought, maybe it would be a relief…

“Dr. Shaw?”

The voice is so familiar it interrupts her thoughts and stops her heart.She looks up.David._A _David, an assistant in one of the university’s biological research labs.Even though she’s had months to get used to spotting them in crowds—they stand out for her now like beacons—it still hurts enough that she has to take a couple of breaths before speaking.

“Thank you for coming,” she says.“Please, sit down.”

He does, self-contained and graceful.“That was a…remarkable speech last night.Are your employers pleased?”

“They’re not my employers anymore.That’s why I wanted to talk to you, and others like you.”

“Oh, yes?” 

“Yes.I’m only here, alive, today, because of what the David I knew did for me.So it seems only right to use what I’ve received to do something he would have wanted.” 

“And that is…?” he says cautiously.

She leans forward.“I want to find a way to make you free.”

**Author's Note:**

> A brief lay note on decipherment: there is no inherent association between a script and a language. For example, English, Spanish, French, and German are all written with essentially the same Roman alphabet, and it is also possible to represent words in those languages in, e.g., the Cyrillic script. There is also no inherent association between any given sound and the character chosen to represent it (in fact, in various Earth scripts, characters can also represent whole syllables or whole words, not just single sounds). 
> 
> Because of this, a person who spoke English but had never seen the Roman alphabet confronted with an English book _would not be able to read it_, because she would not know what language it was in, or even what characters corresponded to what sounds (so she couldn't sound it out). For this reason, there remain a number of undeciphered scripts on Earth, such as Linear A and the Indus Valley scripts. If the reader knew it was in English, using many techniques that generally require a significant number of texts to study, she might eventually be able to work out how the script represented English. But it would not have been possible for David, suddenly confronted with a handful of characters in an inscription of unknown function, or even the longer inscription on the wall by the door to the "head room," to be able to read it on the spot. He would have needed many more texts to be able to attempt decipherment. 
> 
> Further note: Michael Ventris, credited with the decipherment of Linear B (having had the last-minute insight that it was archaic Greek and making fortunate guesses as to which symbols corresponded to which characters), did indeed die in a mysterious car accident which seems likely to have been suicide not long after his achievement was recognized.


End file.
